Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Politics after Piketty

At the library of IESE in Barcelona I found the newly released book "After Piketty. The Agenda for Economics and Inequality," edited by Heather Boushey, Bradford Delong and Marshall Steinbaum. It is a long book with contributions from many authors that discuss the relevance of the famous book written by Thomas Piketty, "Capital in the XXIst Century." I had time to get an idea of the content of the different contributions, and if I am not wrong there is only one that addresses somehow in depth the policy proposals of the book (contained in its last part), namely the creation of a global tax on capital in the long run, but a European version in the short run, accompanied by a democratization of the Euro-zone and the abandonment of the nation-state, at least on Europe, as the locus of the social contract. Only the chapter written by Elisabeth Jacobs addresses the political challenges to introduce such policy innovations. But she ends up suggesting something that seems to come from her narrow (though interesting) research agenda, namely the need to expand the political rights of the poor in the USA, and presumably other democracies. Her criticism that politics is everywhere and at the same time nowhere in Piketty's book is in my view correct. It is not clear what is the political mechanism that will make possible to overcome the political inequalitites that give rise to (or are complementary of) the current income inequalities. But I miss in Jacobs chapter, as in all other chapters (after a superficial look), an analysis of the comments made by Piketty about the nation-state and the need to make progress towards new forms of international federalism. Perhaps it is an inconvenient topic in some places (or perhaps I'm too obsessed by the issue), but one without which I am afraid that the Piketty agenda will make no progress.